During a brief trip to Bombay and Bangalore last week, I had a chance to see how the IT industry has changed since my last trip to India in 1994. Six years is a long time in any part of the IT industry, of course, so it should be no surprise that a lot has happened in India.

In response to Jim Highsmith's Business-IT Strategies E-Mail Advisor of 1 March, " Change Is Changing," I'd like to ask: Is the Internet really changing everything?

One of the ideas that Business Process Reengineering (BPR) people focused on was that some business processes are more important than others. These core business processes are what define the company. These are the processes or competencies that create the products and services that define the company.

I recently presented a session on project communication management to a room of systems people who are highly involved in project work. I explained that, in my opinion, it is difficult to overcommunicate on a project that involves change (and don't they all?). I believe that information -- early and often -- should be provided to the project team, especially to those who are going to be affected by the project outcome.

IPO mania is sweeping across industries like a tidal wave. High-school kids are launching new Internet businesses, while brick and mortar companies spin off e-business ventures. Revenue models may vary, but the goal is to achieve an initial public offering that turns founders and investors into billionaires.

I spent last week attending the Cutter Consortium Summit, which brings Cutter Consortium clients and Senior Consultants together to discuss key issues. One issue that was certainly discussed was the transition to e-business.

At last week's Cutter Consortium Summit 2000 conference in Boston, Massachusetts, one of the sessions was devoted to recruiting, motivating, and retaining IT professionals. Obviously, the main reason IT managers are thinking about this subject is that the overall unemployment rate in the US is at a 20-year low, and the unemployment rate of IT professionals is nearly zero.

According to a recent e-business study from Cutter Consortium, 51% of companies surveyed are currently using Java. An additional 12% are planning to use Java.

We hear that effective business-IT alignment requires the development of business models. This is the way to ensure that the business drives the technology, not the other way around. The awareness of this requirement is an important step; the second step is to ensure that you develop proper business models. Good business models must comply with some core requisites.

Last week, we discussed several important requirements for developing proper business models. Another crucial issue has to do with the specific modeling methodologies or techniques to use.

I've been doing quite a bit of reading, thinking, and writing about e-business development recently. I've especially focused on the kinds of business process changes that typically occur when a large organization decides to transition to an e-business model. In this Advisor, I want to briefly summarize three of the five major drivers that I've observed.

During the last decade or so, as software engineers were required to master more complex technologies, our typical response was to know less and less about the business we supported. IT roles became stratified: programmers had to know the technical idiosyncrasies, systems analysts had to know the business idiosyncrasies, and for some period of your career you could be stuck between these two worlds as a programmer-analyst.

As everyone knows by now, US District Judge Thomas Jackson has ruled that "Microsoft maintained its monopoly power by anticompetitive means and attempted to monopolize the Web browser market ... (thereby violating) ...

Model-based approaches have long been premised on the fact that it is an order of magnitude cheaper to change an exploratory diagram at feasibility than it is to make the same change to the production code, as evidenced by studies carried out in the early 1980s. E-business reinforces the impact of this message by raising the bar for high-quality software. No longer is software designed for single, known individual users; it is designed for vast numbers of anonymous users.